More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

At least they notified you. Some services and companies die without warning, all while taking in money from new customers. I can cite one right now. It is quite obvious, with the forum having spam 44+ days old.. but they continue to take on new long term customers, while leaving promises of new developments long unfulfilled, and ignoring user comments. Either they work a week and take a vacation for at least 44 days, or they are going under. Google is the one who may be putting them under though, as it has added the features that made this company once unique. It is hard to speak without mentioning names, but I am speaking of a real time analytics service. Now, maybe they are alive and well, but they don't seem like it to me. I could be wrong. The problem may simply be not starting small. When you start 'big', with employees and overhead, you've got big revenue expectations. Of course, it is all relative, but the correlation is what I speak of -- your overhead is related to your revenue demands (obviously). Being a one man show, I may be shortening my life with all the stress, but I sure am not taking on extra overhead, as I don't have the capital to risk.

This cleanup of projects is necessary, I believe. While those who rely on them are sadly left 'out in the cold', some needed removal. The reasons vary from overlapping newer services, or no longer having a developer maintaining the project or lab feature. Some lab features have gone so stagnant that they are becoming out of date. That said, I find many extremely useful, and hope that Google encourages new developers to pick up existing lab projects when one developer loses interest. You see, at Google, software engineers are allotted some time to work on whatever project they choose or invent. I believe many of the lab projects are born of this. However, some later die because of a change in interest by the developer.

Now that I've been so nice to Google, let me say that Google is far from perfect (who is?). Their Chromebooks are vastly over-priced, and they seem to underestimate the wide array of uses people and businesses have for PCs. Still, they continue to innovate, and are literally making money on every person they can bring onto the internet.

Just out of curiosity - did anybody here who had an account ever figure out an effective or useful way to use the thing? Because I never could. For me it was Chandler all over again - something that sounded really cool and useful until you actually went to do something with it. At which point it all fell down like a house of cards. However, that might just be me not "getting it."

Just out of curiosity - did anybody here who had an account ever figure out an effective or useful way to use the thing? Because I never could. For me it was Chandler all over again - something that sounded really cool and useful until you actually went to do something with it. At which point it all fell down like a house of cards. However, that might just be me not "getting it."

Google wave was collaboration, the hype and therefore the expectation was more a problem than the product itself. They got the interface wrong too, one column (usually a third of the screen) for talking while the 2/3 were holding lists (subscribed, recent waves, contacts, etc) of sorts. Clumsy look and poor responsiveness killed Wave

Google docs has inherited the real time collaboration from wave. For me, gdocs is wave working well. They just removed the cacophony of the 'community aspects'. In gdocs you collaborate with 1-2 others, and all is well. The community aspect was farmed out to G+.

All these cleanup projects are the work of Larry Page. Keep experimenting, but we're not going to carry something indefinitely as the world moves on. Chromebooks are down to $299 for the Holidays, too (wi-fi only though). I like Google right now because its apps serve me well (Docs, G+, Gmail), but I'm also ready to remove my data at the drop of a hat when they start walling themselves in, as facebook is doing.

Didn't play with it myself, but from what I heard it was too complex, too alien, too sluggish, and didn't integrate well enough with non-wave services. And it had this "well, we made this cool new thing, but we don't know quite what to do with it, and aren't going to market it very heavily" feel from the start, so it comes as no surprise to me they're killing it off. GTalk integration in GMail goes a long way, anyway.

Now, killing off google code search, that's a shame. It was an interesting idea, and there was an interesting IDAplugin for it

I say it so often I sound like a sound loop: Never sign on for anybody's head trip but your own. And never trust any cloud you don't personally own with anything extremely important to you. "Own or be owned." That's my motto.

I played with Wave on a number of occasions and in the context of 2 separate companies, and I never did find a situation where it was *clearly* better than either email, or a collaborative document workspace like GDocs is now (or Zoho was at that time, a bit ahead of GDocs then). I also don't think it really gave Google much useful info that they would have applied to G+, much more likely they applied its lessons to Gdocs and GApps in general. G+ isn't collaborative at all, nor is it anywhere near as persistent, both of which were huge founding principles of Wave.

Anyway, I'm glad Google experimented and let us all share in that experiment, but I'm also glad they have the sense to stop using resources on it when it clearly either wasn't a product that could/should succeed, wasn't ready to succeed, or "the world wasn't ready for it". In either of those 3 cases it is right to "kill" it for now. Fortunately Google is doing it right and open sourcing it, so if the idea is truly good, users can decide that and continue using it.

I too played around with Wave and genuinely gave it a good "suck-it-and-see".But though it was an interesting "thing", it never did seem to add up - at least not as far as I could see. So my BS alarm went off and I tended to be highly skeptical of the whole idea when I saw/heard the talks and fanfares (read "hype and BS") about it.Its use would have been apparent - if it had been of any use to anyone - and then it would not have needed all that nonsense.

EDIT 2011-11-28: Though its use might have been difficult to perceive at first, having been open-minded and interested enough to give the thing a good "suck-it-and-see", its use would probably have become apparent to the user - if it had been of any use to anyone - and then it might not have needed all that nonsense.

No surprises when it was bumped off - showed good business sense.If Google decided to keep all of its lame duck ß products going indefinitely, then that could be a disastrous business decision.

It seemed as though it was an interesting solution to an undefined/nonexistant problem.

I think the kiss of death to many of the Google ß products/services is when they are launched with the accompanying words:

"We're excited to announce..." (OWTTE)

Since it is generally true that it is difficult to be in an excited and a rational state of mind at one and the same time, I usually run a mile in the opposite direction when I hear that phrase.

Spare a thought for all those poor Wave developers/marketers who put their best and earnest endeavours into trying to create some Emperor's new clothes - and some even ranted on enthusiastically about it on YouTube broadcasts. Uncomfortable/embarrassing to watch those vids now though.I sometimes wonder whether that could have an adverse effect if they mentioned it in their CVs.

I disagree. I see this quite often with new innovations. For example, Nintendo lately has been introducing new ideas/technologies to the field of video games. With the Nintendo DS, they introduced a portable device with two screens, one of which had touch screen controls. With the Nintendo Wii, they introduced motion-based gameplay and pointer capabilities.

Game developers didn't really know what to do with these technologies. So what we got (and are still getting, to some degree) was a load of unimaginative crapware with shallow, gimmicky uses of these new technologies. It took time for people and developers to have that paradigm shift in which they realized legitimately fun and neat uses for these technologies.

You see this same period of bewilderment with the introduction of many innovative technologies. You summed it up pretty well right here:

It seemed as though it was an interesting solution to an undefined/nonexistant problem.

I am reminded of the invention of the laser. When the laser was invented, it was really cool but nobody really knew what to use it for. It was the solution to an undefined, unknown, and seemingly non-existant problem. Yet today the laser has all sorts of applications and new uses are still being discovered/invented regularly. I probably have about 10 lasers in my house alone including all my devices that are capable of reading CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays.

In my opinion, Wave was a great idea that was poorly executed. It was perhaps a bit before its time, though. Imagine if it was made with HTML5 and these new, fast JavaScript engines!

Exactly what was Wave's big idea? I have never been able to determine (to my satisfaction at least) exactly what the idea, paradigm, or unique concept was that lay under Wave.

And while the laser story has bearing on innovation in general, it's still an engineering technology. So yes, it was a solution out 'in search of a problem' for a number of years. But at least it was unique and had measurable capabilities. And it could be understood. And defined.

Wave, on the other hand, started fuzzy and just got fuzzier the more you thought about it, until you finally felt you were standing in a hall of mirrors. To me, it was a case of there being "no 'there' there" as Virginia Wolfe so nicely put it. So if I'm missing something, somebody please please please enlighten me.

Wave's big idea was to an extent G+, without the inherent social aspects, but in real time. The ability to meet with people and share arbitrary information collaboratively with someone was what wave was supposed to be. It was just poorly implemented, especially because they were still having technical difficulties.

G+ looks like a copy of diaspora with Google video talk (hangout) enabled in it. Wave on the other hand was different in terms of UI. I don't see any connection between wave and G+. Wave looks like a mix of gmail, messenger, shared wiki (collab package in general). I don't see any of wave's feature migrated to the G+.

Well, though I wasn't wondering whether anyone agreed or not, I do appreciate your gratuitous disagreement, but I do think I phrased that badly.My apologies, but my comment was a bit disjointed as I was trying to write whilst trying (unsuccessfully) to put up with nearby interruptions. I would rather say:

Though its use might have been difficult to perceive at first, having been open-minded and interested enough to give the thing a good "suck-it-and-see", its use would probably have become apparent to the user - if it had been of any use to anyone - and then it might not have needed all that nonsense.

I have edited the post appropriately.

You make the valid point about innovation.The precursor to innovation is usually the invention of something (which can subsequently be subjected to innovation). The output from many Japanese manufacturers, over the years, has been held to show classic examples of innovation.

Modern history shows that some of the most useful discoveries/inventions of mankind's were the result of experimental discovery, or trial and error, or accident. The rest were largely attributable to deliberate research/design.As examples of accidents, you have penicillin, and polythene. In the case of polythene, I recall my father-in-law (he was a an industrial chemist) telling me that whilst they were making napthalene (I think it was that) at the ICI plant in Northwich (UK) during the WW2 years and afterwards, there was this horrible gooey stuff produced as a by-product and which they had no use for. It was apparently polythene, or the precursor to it. The accidental creation of something, the use for which (the invention) remained unrealised for some time.

I don't think the same could necessarily be said about Wave though.I think Wave would probably have been made to a deliberate design - a prototype - so it would probably have had an objective. I have no idea what that objective might have been.

Maybe, as @wraith808 seems to be suggesting, Wave was intended to be a prototype precursor to Google+. But then I have the same reservations about G+ as I did about Wave.

It seemed as though it was an interesting solution to an undefined/nonexistant problem.

If that seems a bit unfair, then let's pose a question: How many different designs of mousetraps do we actually need in the marketplace, for us to be able to feel secure in the knowledge that we each have a good choice of mousetraps and that we are probably using what feels like the "best" or optimum one for us?

Maybe the answer is unknown, and yet there is the tantalising prospect/possibility of hitting pay-dirt if we "just keep on digging".In the development of information technology, this may mean that an acceptable business approach is for producers to take a commercial risk by tweaking/perfecting already perfectly good mousetraps, and applying innovative thinking like mad.This is what the Japanese electronics manufacturers have been doing for years, and it seems to have paid off for them. They release most of their prototypes into the home market before exporting more widely. The prototypes ("gadgets") often have a short lifecycle. Sometimes the gadgets are testing out the viability of a particular method or technology, and sometimes those gadgets get bundled into a subsequent integrated product.

The marketing term for this is "product development and test marketing", and it is a classic, methodical approach.This is arguably what Google might be doing - and it seems more likely the case if you consider that they have recently discontinued/shut down a raft of their unsuccessful prototypes. Or maybe they were successful prototypes and Google learned what they needed to from the test marketing.If there is some truth in this, then it could further support @wraith808's suggestion.

I can see shadows of Wave in Google+ but I think Wave was more than that.

The best way I think I could describe my interpretation of Wave is to say it was like Microsoft OneNote in the cloud but with privacy settings (who can see/edit what) for just about all content you added to it, and extendable with apps and bots to add even more features.

@IainB I wasn't meaning to single you out before. I was just offering a different viewpoint than the one you shared and it was convenient for me to quote the words which got my brain going on the train of thought that followed.